


Four People James T. Kirk Never Told (and three he did)

by ninhursag



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Backstory, Child Abuse, Multi, UST, not explicit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-26
Updated: 2010-01-26
Packaged: 2017-10-06 17:42:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/56198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninhursag/pseuds/ninhursag
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The obligatory angry, underaged non-con fic.  Also known as, hey, why did Jim drive his step dad's car off a cliff?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Four People James T. Kirk Never Told (and three he did)

**Author's Note:**

> Five things fic. This was supposed to be for a kink meme prompt, but got waaaay out of hand and failed to develop porn.

1\. Winona Kirk

Later on he'd never admit this, but his first love was books. Not just the shiny smooth surfaces of reading tablets with their bright, easy contrast screens-- real books with smelly, pulpy pages that felt good under his fingertips.

He'd taught himself to read them at some point-- he couldn't even remember when. His mother didn't know until she caught him curled up in a corner of her office with a book wedged into his lap, fat child fingers thumbing through the pages with an uncoordinated gracelessness.

She'd laughed, and that was probably why he kept that memory because that was unusual. His mom back then was the prettiest and best, but she didn't laugh much. "That was your father's favorite," she said and climbed into the corner with him, pulling him into her lap. "Why don't you read it to me, Jimmy?"

She kissed him on the back of his head and hugged him close while he went through the words spreading out underneath him and helped him along when he stumbled over the hard ones, where he knew what they _meant_, but not how to say them.

When he was ten, things started to change. Mom smiled more, smiled a lot. One time she even went around the room humming tunelessly until Jim stared at her and asked if she was okay. Then she laughed and patted him on the head.

"I met someone," she said. She put her hand to her forehead, like she'd forgotten something, like she was apologizing. "At an antique engine show. He was-- he really knows his stuff. I think... I think I might be happy with him. I think... what if I have him over for dinner and you see what you think of him, hmm?"

So then there was Mike. What Jim thought of him was that he smelled weird-- like old sweat, left to moulder and green grass, new mowed and sharp. It was a weird smell-- it didn't combine right and it didn't wash away easy. It lingered where the guy sat, where he touched. The couch in the living room started to smell like that. The dining room chairs. Then Jim's mom, she did too.

That wasn't even the worst part. The worst was Mike's face whenever Mom wasn't looking was... odd and hungry, like a drooling rabid dog on a nature show Jim watched. It wasn't anything he knew what to do with.

But, "I'm happy," she said. "Will you be happy for me, Jimmy?" So he said he was.

When Jim was eleven, almost twelve, Mike moved in and Mom took a job as chief engineer of a long haul freighter. "I miss space," she said and then she hugged Jim tight to her chest, crushing the breath out of him. "I miss the way the engines smell and the way the ship vibrates. I thought I'd never go back after-- after the Kelvin, but I'm ready now. You understand, don't you, Jimmy?"

"Yeah," Jim whispered. "Okay." She smiled so proudly Jim's stomach ached and he looked away.

It was less than a week before she swung her go bag over her shoulder and leaned to press a kiss to the tip of Jim's nose like he was still a baby. "Be good for Mike," she said. "I'll write you ever day."

"Me too," Jim said and forced a smile to answer hers. When she walked out the door they were both crying, though.

Jim had a book on social statistics-- one his mom said that Dad had picked up at a flea market somewhere. She smiled and shook her head when she said it, like she thought the book was really silly, but Jim thought it was interesting. Anyway, it was his _dad's_.

On page seventy-eight, in the chapter on family dysfunction, it said that 75% of mothers didn't know when their child was being abused. Jim knew that what he was supposed to do was tell her, that it was the right thing. He didn't, he never did.

Instead he took the book and the full stack of the rest of them, tottering under the weight of all that woodpulp paper. He took them into the kitchen and stacked them up where they'd catch the curtains before he lit them all on fire.

The whole room went up in thirty seconds, bright and hot. Like the Olympic torch. Like the engine of a star ship. Jim watched, open mouthed, breathing in heat and smoke. It turned out that books? Were kind of fucking useless for anything but burning.

The fire department got there in sixty seconds. He kicked and scratched like he was the rabid animal when they dragged him out of the kitchen, like they were killing him instead of saving him. He bit his lip through, but they told him later he hadn't made a sound even though he was badly burned enough he must have been in agony. After he spent a day in a bed in the burn unit, so doped up he couldn't even remember his name, let alone Mike's while they grew new skin for him in a vat in the lab.

His mom came home as fast as she could-- which turned out to be about two months. Freighters on the ass end of space didn't stop for anything, especially not an engineer's batshit crazy kid's mental breakdown. She made it the day after his twelfth birthday.

She looked so sad when she came home. Tight faced and miserable, her hands clenched on the doorposts of Jim's room, the room he'd barely set foot out of in weeks. "What the hell did I do wrong?" she demanded. He can't remember the last time she swore, he really can't. It made him flinch and stare down at his feet.

"Nothing," he whispered. "I'm sorry."

"Is it because of Mike?" she continued, like he hadn't said a word. "You said you were happy for me, Jimmy. You said... I'm tired." She covered her face with her hands like she was going to cry. Jim tasted blood where he'd bitten through his lower lip.

"I love you, Mom," he said, soft and miserable. He knees were pushed up against his chin before he even realized he'd curled up. Twisted and wrapped around himself like a baby. Then she was there, on the edge of his bed, hugging him hard.

He'd had no idea how much he missed her before he could smell her again, feel her close and tight. Her shampoo and the warm, bright scent of engine grease. "I love you too, baby," she whispered. Her head tucked against his chin. "God, I was so scared. At first all they could tell me was that there was a fire and you were hurt. Jesus, Jimmy." She cradled his neck with her palm and Jim buried his face in her shoulder.

If there'd ever been a chance to tell, this was it. He even had his mouth half open, but when he raised his chin, Mike was there, hovering in the doorway, looking at him. Just looking. He smiled and it was all Jim could do not to flinch.

"Come on, guys," he said with that fake, rabid cheer that made Jim want to burn down the whole world. "I made you lunch, you both look like you could use it." Jim didn't say anything, but he held his mom's hand going down the stairs like he was a little kid and wondered in a weird, morbid sort of way if Mike was going to poison him with lunch to keep him quiet.

He wasn't really worried though. They both knew he wasn't going to talk, couldn't do that. Not to Mom. She was happy. She said she was happy.

The one thing Mike hadn't lied about was loving those antique engines. He and mom bought this completely awesome 1960's convertible at auction. It was like something out of a museum and it gleamed in the sun while Mom worked on it and Mike watched her and whistled. Jim watched too, and wondered if she could be happy long doing that. Being at home, working on projects like this, being right there so that things would be okay. For a little while, at least.

She stayed home almost five months before she took another freighter assignment. "Just a short haul," she said, and pressed a kiss on the top of Jim's head. "I'll be able to round back within a week if I absolutely need to. I won't need to, though, will I, Jimmy?"

"I promise," Jim whispered and stared at the ground, fingers digging into palms.

She was gone another two months and he tried to not be at home at all during that time. Mostly, that was a good plan. When she came back, it was only for a three week layover, but she smiled the whole time, whistling everywhere like the world was awesome.

She worked back up to the long hauls by the time Jim was thirteen.

He wouldn't have told later, even if anyone had ever asked, what it was exactly that set him off the final time. He remembered the smell, the nasty Mike smell that would get under his fingernails and then into his mouth nostrils where you couldn't get soap to go without gagging, but that's wasn't new.

Maybe there wasn't anything new. Maybe he was just tired. Maybe he finally had a plan. Or maybe all of the above was one more lie.

The plan had two parts-- the first was a video recording and that was easy. All he had to do was set it up in his bedroom, pull the covers over his head and wait. It wasn't like Mike was gonna check for bugs.

The second was the hardest. Illegal intoxicants were a pain in the ass for anyone to get, but especially for a kid who looked-- who was fourteen. Lucky Mike had taught him skills. Real textbook irony lucky, enough to make him laugh. He needed them, though. He'd checked conviction rates for... for what Mike had done. The ones for drugs gave him way better odds.

The last part only took some waiting and time with a driver's simulation program until he had the old fashioned ignition, gas and break figured out as well as he was going to without actually having sat behind the wheels of a car. He wasn't worried about that part-- this thing was going down.

He stole the keys to the car off the hook in his mom's room, wiped his prints off the package of intoxicants and the vid chip and very carefully applied Mike's prints on instead. It was beautiful, a case of set up right out of a mystery novel.

Actually driving felt better than anything that had happened to Jim in a long, long time. Top down, wind in his hair, knuckles on the leather steering wheel made a 100 MPGs feel more like thousands. When the cop started chasing him, it felt even better. An audience was the final piece of this puzzle.

Jim tipped his head back, laughed and stepped on the gas. It was his birthday-- his fourteenth.

Afterwards, no one had to ask him why, not even his mom. He figured the cops must have shown her the vid chip. Mike went downstate to a medium security prison and Mom stopped going on freighter hauls, stopped humming out of tune, stopped smiling.

Jim stopped being sorry she felt bad.

2\. Carol Marcus

He met Carol Marcus at a ceremony for the family and survivors of the Kelvin. In a way it was like destiny. He was the one trying to rig a make shift machine gun set up to bean the speaker with Vulcan sand slugs at exactly the moment when he started droning on about legacies and honoring memory. She was the one who spiked the punch with hallucinogenics.

They both ended up locked in the same room while someone chewed out their parents. Except, Jim's mom was off world and Carol's dad was installing monumental art on the mall in Washington, so it was Mike and Carol's Aunt Betty that got it. Their other parents were both atoms, floating through space.

Carol wore more eye make-up than a reporter and had a pierced nose and a crazy quilted head scarf she always complained about but that he found out later she wore all the time anyway. Her skirt was hiked up so high the wind probably whistled through and Jim half heartedly pretended not to notice that part.

She laughed at him for that one. "I'm Carol," she said and offered up her hand. "Sand slugs, huh?"

He took it. Her grip was steady and firm, her small fingers pressed into his palm. "Jim. And the Betan green jelly was better," he admitted. "My favorite part was when Admiral Langdon decided the Orion Ambassador's hair was on fire."

She smirked. "Yeah. That was pretty good, right? Of course, those things were not easy to get. Totally worth it to make those fucktards cry, though."

Jim laughed and shook his head. "Yeah, but we're stuck here now." He cast a pinched gaze at the door, but it was good and locked and he wasn't exactly set up to pick it.

She just shrugged. "Yeah. Want me to teach you how to cheat at poker?" And really, that might have been the best offer Jim ever got from a girl in the history of ever.

An hour in, he almost managed to forget Mike was coming to get him, right up until the door swung open. Jim flinched when he looked up and saw him, glaring like an asshole, pinched gaze on Jim's skin.

Mike's voice when he spoke was smooth and quiet, like he was a nice guy, a great guy. "Jimmy, kid, what am I going to do with you?" he asked. He didn't even sound mad, but Jim could hear the mad anyway.

Jim shook his head and didn't say anything because he'd known this part was coming all along. "I'll meet you outside," Mike said and all he could do was nod and wince when the door closed.

He flinched even harder when a hand covered his, before he realized it was Carol's. When he turned to look at her, he had no idea what was in his expression, but it must have been something. She reflected it back to him, tired and strained, his own face pale and scared in the mirror of her pupils.

"Hey," she whispered in his ear. "You live in Iowa too, right? Come and see me sometime, okay?" She slid a data chip into his palm and he nodded.

After that, he saw her a lot. Almost every day after school, like she didn't really have anyone she wanted to see either.

Carol liked to talk. She talked a lot and often, waving her arms to emphasize her points. Then she'd laugh. She sang out of tune, just like Jim's mom, but louder. Her favorite things were music, cheating at games and the math behind terraforming.

"The second half of the twentieth century was the fucking sine qua non of pop music," she said. "I mean-- it makes sense. The first half of the century was just this-- war, disease, poverty and genocide, it was like a fucking petri dish. A cultural fucking miasma. History happening. What the hell are we going to experience compared to that, right?"

When she got like that she'd down half a bottle of Mike's prime vodka and stand on the coffee table, jumping up and down pretending to thrash a guitar and shrieking at the top of her lungs. "Twenty-twenty-twenty-four hours to go! I wanna be sedated!"

By the time Jim finished the second half of the bottle he let her grab him by the wrist and pull him up next to her, convinced he could sing. More often than not it ended up with them both falling off the table and slamming onto the floor, a tumble of limbs and knees and elbows on his mom's filthy gray rug.

If they were too tired to move they'd stay like that a long time, until Jim got used to the way she smelled and they way she felt, safe and warm, her heart beating against his ear in time with the wild buzz of liquor charging through his veins.

\

There were a lot of good things, but the best thing about Carol was that she figured Jim out without him having to explain anything. He never asked how she did it, the best he figured was that she was living with her aunt in the ass end of nowhere instead of her dad and his girlfriend in New York City for a reason.

He knew for sure that she knew after the time he climbed her aunt's ridiculous thirty-foot pine tree, the one with the brittle, breakable branches, to get Carol's scarf after she dropped the stupid thing and the wind caught it and tangled it into the branches. "Don't be an idiot! I hate that thing anyway!" Carol screamed after him while he climbed, but he just laughed at her.

She kissed him on the mouth when he slid down. His hands and knees were torn up and bruised from the rough bark and her scarf still caught in his teeth when she kissed him. It wasn't his first kiss, but for just a second it felt like it was, that it was supposed to be. This was how it was supposed to be. Silk and spit in his mouth so that at first he couldn't even feel lips or skin at all, just the soft press of Carol's shirt against his bare arms.

He didn't freak out until she eased the fabric aside with her fingers, until she slid them into his mouth. The world went white for a second. White and red and painful, buzzing in his ears and memories he didn't want. He didn't know he was shaking until the kiss was already over and she was looking at him. Just looking.

He winced away. He could feel himself blush, red and hot and stupid, but Carol just made a soft noise and cupped his cheek, holding on tight and ignoring the second flinch. "Focus, Jim," she said. "You shouldn't let that asswipe deprive you of your... your fucking civil rights to orgasms."

Jim blinked up at her. Half a second for him to analyze and decide to avoid the minefield, not engage. "Freak. I dunno what you're even talking about," he muttered. "And I also don't know what version of the bill of rights you're reading."

"Don't be a geek. You know what I'm saying. These are our-- are _your_ fucking natural rights to... to fucking!" She smacked him across the back of the neck and that touch was different. Better.

Jim stared at her for a second too long before laughing and shaking his head. It made his chest hurt a little. "I don't really think I need a natural right to fucking," he admitted after too long of him saying nothing and her glaring at him.

She shrugged, stretching out her arms and cracking her back. "You don't know that unless you've tried it for real. Trust me, this will be different." She frowned at him. "Unless you're chicken. Are you?"

"No," he scoffed, head jerking up. "No. I'm not."

Carol tilted her head and looked at him seriously. "Then you don't trust me? You tried to kill yourself on that death trap tree for my fucking useless scarf, but you don't trust me?"

He shrugged and stuff his hands in his back pockets. "I trust you," he muttered. "I do. Fine." Maybe it was like climbing trees. No hesitation, no looking down. He took a deep breath and jerked forward, almost stumbling into her. His body felt shaky and robotic, like it was made of something stiff and foreign.

Their teeth clacked together when he kissed her, but he barely felt pain over the buzzing in his veins. She laughed and steadied him with her hands. Her touch was careful and delicate over his flushed skin.

"This is gonna feel so good," she promised. "You have no idea."

\

Carol jumped off a roof and broke her neck on a sunny early spring day when the snowdrops had just started blooming. The police report that Jim hacked into later said she had a blood intoxication level off the charts, no way she could have known what she was doing. A witness said she was trying to fly.

She left him a voicemail, stuttery and faint, it must have been seconds before she fell. "I am the fucking embodiment of the fucking twentieth century, Jim!" she said. "And it is the _best_, you have to try it."

There was a pause on the line, brief and breathy. Static crackled, like the wind was whistling by. Her voice was quieter when it came again, almost inaudible. "I just want you to know. I want to grow up and terraform the stars-- the fucking stars, Jim! I want to change the world. I want to-- I want to, I don't know-- maybe marry you and have non-fucked up kids. I want you to know."

The line went dead. Carol was fourteen years old and three months pregnant.

Carol lived. The baby she never told him about, not in words, didn't. When Jim hacked the police report he printed out the pictures. It was a boy, it would have been a boy. He was glad it wasn't born, but he kept them all.

One week later, after Carol's Dad came to collect her from the psych ward and take her back to New York, Jim drove Mike's car off a cliff, one of Carol's favorite albums blasting from the stereo. All the evidence of what the fucker had done and a couple of things he hadn't in case it wasn't good enough tucked into the trunk for the cops to find.

He missed going over the edge with it-- missed being one more piece of physical evidence-- by a fingergrip on slippery rock and dirt. If you asked him later, he couldn't have told you how much of it was on purpose. Or which parts.

Years later, when she was Dr. Marcus and he was Captain Kirk, Carol would forward him her articles, the ones that drew out the threads of math and logic they'd first started to poke into when they were kids and spun them into worlds.

_Hey, Jim,_ she'd write. _Remember this? Watch us change the world._ And he would smile at the screen and picture her face, young and beautiful, pulling him into a kiss.

 

3\. Captain Pike

In a bar in the asshole of Iowa, a Starfleet Captain looked a boy with a battered face in the eye and told him he could do something with his life.

Pike said a lot of things that night, maybe too much. One of them was, "I found something interesting when I looked up your records. Did you know someone altered your juvenile file?"

Kirk raised an eyebrow and leaned forward onto his elbows. Which hurt from being applied forcefully to some asshole's nose, but never mind that. "Really? I thought a fine star fleet officer like yourself would have the codes to get into a blocked record."

"Not blocked, Jim. Altered. And not by the police or judiciary either, there'd have been traces of that." Pike shook his head, as if he was trying to show just how serious this all was. "What it looks like is that someone hacked into the system and erased some key data on an incident you'd been involved in. That's one hell of a felony, you know that?"

Kirk shrugged. "Wow. I really hope they catch the guy who did it then," he said. Then he smiled and slammed down the remains of his shot.

Pike shook his head. "It was a really interesting incident, you see. Because what the record as it stands makes it look like happened is that you drove your step-father's incredibly expensive antique automobile off a cliff. And then _he_ went to prison for ten years."

Kirk wiped his mouth and smiled wider. "Really, really... wow," he said. "Between shit like that and surviving the Kelvin as a newborn, I must have had the fucking devil's own luck."

He met Pike's gaze and held it head on for a ten count. He counted them all out, keeping himself and his smile steady. Pike was the one who looked away first. "No, Jim," he said, soft and serious, staring at the puddle of condensation forming around his glass on the table. "I don't think you did. Did you know the officer on that case was a good friend of mine from high school?"

Kirk forced his gaze to stay steady, but it made his eyes water. "You don't say," he muttered.

"If you do join Starfleet, altering records isn't a forgivable offense," Pike said. He paused. "Going forward that is."

Kirk shrugged and raised his empty glass, staring at the bottom. "Sure," he said. "If I ever feeling like doing that, I'll keep it in mind."

4\. Spock (Prime)

It was so cold, Jim's ass felt like it was going to shatter and all his fingers were numb. The only points of warmth where on his face, where Spock's fingers touched.

So much loss. Waves of it, deep and black and bottomless. They drove into him, the losing the knowing. A world of it, six billion. Jim heard them falter and scream and then turn off. Like they'd never been there, like they'd left nothing behind but the echo of screaming.

It made Jim's knees buckle, made his eyes sting where the cold and wind hadn't already burned them.

"I'm sorry," he whispered and he didn't know if it was out loud. "I wish I could do something. I wish there were something I could do." It didn't matter what he said and what he just thought about saying. Spock could hear him. Spock could hear everything about him, know everything he'd ever been just the way that Jim could.

Knowing that, knowing that Spock knew-- it should matter but it didn't, not much. It was something small and petty and perverse, a bucket of personal shit washed off shore by the oceans of horror. It only stung a little to hold that memory up against Spock's Kirk, his friend, who was loved and whole in the places Jim wasn't.

"I as well, Jim," Spock said. He even sounded like he believed it.

 

5\. Bones, Spock (the other one) and Uhura (hell, why not?)

 

His knuckles were sore and bleeding and his face felt like he'd been pounding it into a concrete block, but he wasn't crying because he was hurt. He rubbed his cheeks raw, salt and blood staining his fingers, but he still couldn't breathe right.

Spock just looked at him, grave, impassive. "You are... angry. The situation is extremely difficult," he said. "It is understandable." Which, wow, there was an admission. Too bad he felt too sick to enjoy it.

"Difficult?" Jim would have laughed, but his face hurt. "He... they. They're little kids and... what he did..."

"They are," Spock said. "And he did. And yet, this planet's government is one we must negotiate with. There are no other options. And you have, how did you put it? Attempted to 'destroy the fucker's fucking face'."

"Yeah," Jim said. He did laugh at that. Ow. "They'll get over it. We were both wasted and it's a dueling culture. It reflects well on my _manhood_ to get into fistfights." Manhood came out like a curse word, he couldn't help it.

Spock shrugged. "Tomorrow, you must negotiate without the excuse of being intoxicated. Can you do so?"

Jim looked away, like the walls were going to help him. They just sat where they were though, nice smooth, shiny bulkheads. Not helpful. He squeezed his eyes shut. Right. "You're going to have to finish this mission, Spock." He took a deep breath and opened his eyes again. "I'm the-- I'm emotionally compromised this time out, and of course you know the regs. It's a... a personal thing." Don't ask, Jim thought but didn't say. Fuck, fuck, do not ask.

Spock looked him in the eye, steadily and seriously, like he was reading Jim's mind. He didn't touch, so that much was a lie. Jim knew Vulcans could only read your mind if they were touching.

"Very well, Captain," Spock finally said. "I will complete the negotiations. I will take Lt. Uhura with me for assistance as she is the most conversant in the language."

"Uhura?" Jim shook his head. "Do you think she'll be able to--"

"It will be difficult, as it would be for any of us. However, for her it will not be personal," Spock interrupted and looked at Jim impassively until Jim shrugged, nodded and looked away. Yeah, Uhura was better at keeping it together than he was. Not news.

Spock might have let it go at that, except that a week later Uhura had to personally drag Jim out of a fist fight with a body builder from Alpha Centurai and his cyborg buddy before they put him through a window.

"We'll talk to you about this later," she said, after she deposited him in sickbay. She sounded deadly serious. He groaned and covered his face.

"Who's we anyway?" he mumbled, but she was already gone. Like it wasn't obvious.

When Bones finally showed up to treat him, he just shook his head. "You're an idiot, Jim," Bones told him with all the appearance of relish. "As usual. An emotionally repressed twelve year old."

"I wasn't even emotionally repressed when I was twelve," Jim muttered, cracking one eye open. "I lit my mom's kitchen on fire. That was definitely emotionally aware."

Bones glared at him. "You keep throwing around words like you know what they mean. Idiot."

Jim closed his eyes and pretended to be dead. That worked pretty well. Bones sat down next to him and kept looking at him for way too long, but he didn't say anything else, just kind of breathed in Jim's direction.

"Why the hell did you set your mother's kitchen on fire?" When Bones asked the question it was so sudden, after such a long silence, that Jim almost got tricked into admitting he wasn't dead yet. He twitched once, but kept his eyes shut. Let out an experimental snore.

"Laugh now, but I'm going to sic pointy ears and the perfect woman on you," Bones growled.

Asshole.

"I also think you need some vaccine updates," Bones continued, like he was talking to himself. "Now that I've got you here unconscious. The side effects aren't too bad either. Nine out of ten dicks don't get the rash for longer than--"

Jim sat upright on the table, way too fast, fast enough to make the room spin. He gripped on for dear life. "What? What do you want me to say, Dr. Fucking McCoy? That it was a futile attempt to make my mom notice her husband was fucking me up the ass?"

Bones stared at him, mouth hanging open, eyes cartoonishly huge in a way that would have been absolutely hilarious if Jim could see anything much through the haze of red. "Is that what you wanted to hear?" Jim spat when there wasn't any reaction in the allowed three point five seconds.

Bones shut his mouth with a snap. "No," he said. If he was feeling as shaky as he looked, he kept it out of his voice. "Actually I was hoping to hear a funny story about how you tried to cook pasta in the frying pan." There was another long silence while they both glared at each other, breathing too hard, hands clenched.

Bones broke first that time. "Jesus, Jim," he whispered. Now Jim could hear the tremor in his voice. He sounded weird. Hoarse, but not like he was drunk, just like he was old. Really old and feeling it for the first time.

"What?" Jim snapped, but there wasn't much force in it. "Come on, what?"

Bones didn't say anything else, though. Instead he did the other thing-- grabbed onto Jim's hand and squeezed it hard enough to hurt. Jim sat there and let him for what felt like forever before he could squeeze it back, but Bones didn't act like he had anything better to do.

He managed to get away without being cornered by the Spock and Uhura monolith of single minded doom for the better part of a week, usually by hiding behind the nearest likely looking pile of actual work he could find.

In the end it was inevitable and at least he managed to steer them to his office and make them sit down rather than trying to do it in a hallway. It was nice and formal. He could do nice and formal and clinical. Also, he could see the stars on the observation window behind their heads, which was really kind of awesome. They looked at him.

"Captain, as your officers and shipmates, we believe that--" Spock began and then looked at Uhura instead. She shrugged.

"If there's something you think we need to know." She gave him the beginnings of a smile, careful but warm. Jim blinked. He couldn't remember her ever smiling at him like that before. "We're your friends too, you know."

So Jim pretended to look at them, looked at the stars instead, and he told them. Nice and formal and clinical. He used all the really big words from the anatomy textbook and everything.

That lasted until Spock said, "If we can be of any assistance, Captain--"

"Like what kind? What are you going to do? Fix me with your giant alien dick?" Jim muttered and rolled his eyes. Uhura made a sound, like an indrawn breath and he glared at her. If someone thought he was playing victim of the week, they could eat it.

Of course, this was Spock, so it wasn't going to go like that. "That would be extremely illogical," Spock said, like the whole conversation was serious. He sounded like he wasn't sure if he was supposed to sound repressive or pedantic. "There is no record of the use of sex as a successful technique to heal the aftereffects of sexual trauma in humans."

Jim raised an eyebrow and leaned forward. This time he looked at them instead of the stars and they looked back at him "Wait," he said. "You mean someone actually tried that? Seriously?"

Spock nodded gravely. "Indeed. There are records of several psychological schools, particularly in the mid twenty-first century that made such attempts to treat victims of forced sexual encounters. Unsuccessfully, as I said."

"Really?" Jim squeaked before Uhura ruined it by meeting his eyes. And that was it for both of them, they just burst out. "Oh god. Sexual healing." Jim couldn't have help the sputters of laughter if the ship depended on it. Just-- the look on Spock's face and Uhura laughing along with him.

Every time they met each other's eyes it started again, with Spock just watching them impassively like this was great science or something. It choked Jim a little-- these heavy, deep laughs that just spilled out of him. By the time it stopped it left him as shaken and drained afterwards as if it had been a crying jag and he wasn't sitting alone on his side of the desk anymore. Uhura moved her chair and sat down next to him, close enough to touch.

Spock watched him through it, looking stupidly serene and weirdly satisfied. "You both find this response-- laughter-- to be productive," he said calmly just so that Jim would be absolutely sure the pointy eared bastard had made him laugh on purpose.

Jim shrugged and smiled helplessly, because what else was there to do now? "I'm okay, you know. Really. There are probably always going to be things I'm weird about, but honestly, I'm as good as I'm going to get. Which is... good. Things are good."

"We know, Jim," Uhura said and she smiled back at him. She reached out to take his hand and he let her hold on. Her grip was solid, compassion under skin.

He smirked at her, his biggest, smarmiest grin. "But, hey, if you guys wanna give this sexual healing thing a spin, I might go along with you. You know. Just for the science, of course-- those guys in the mid twenty-first century did lousy work, no real controls."

Mostly he expected one or both of them to smack him upside the head. Instead, they kissed him. Just a press of lips on his mouth, warm and solid and promising worlds, one after the other.


End file.
